A hot summer afternoon in my shop with a fly or two buzzing around my head makes me look yearningly at the lazy fluffs of clouds in the sky and wish I were out there somewhere on the sparkling sea, waves lapping at the hull of my boat, nothing more to do than stand at the helm and allow my senses to inhale the essence of our amazing coastal waters.

“Vacationland,” they call our state. For amusement, I turn on my scanner to eavesdrop on what’s going on beyond …

I’ve been cutting a few white pines just lately – the Maine state tree, bearing, in this season, the state flower. It’s not much of a flower some would say, not very showy, not much of a smell – just a pale yellow tassel in the whispering forest canopy.

But . . . there’s something to be said for numbers, and there certainly are a lot of those pine flowers nodding across the state – a lot of pine trees for that matter, great tracts covered by them, whole towns, and on every tree, how many …

Of this essay, Barnaby writes, “Some of this piece might read like fiction. It’s not . . . not a word.”

April is my favorite month of year, not only for the whisperings and stirrings of spring it offers but for the promises it makes and for the associations it has left me with in my lifetime. I was born in early April, which was perfect so far as I was concerned as a kid. It was the beginning of fishing season, serious bike riding and baseball. There was no better time to have a birthday with a good likelihood of receiving at least one of those badly needed trappings of boyhood, like a new fishing rod or a baseball glove.

Birthdays aren’t quite so exciting as they used to be, but they…

Note from Barnaby: “This is a letter I wrote in 1986, 33 years ago, to my friend, Bill Tyne, who spends summers on Merry Island.”

Dear Bill,

I haven’t written in some time, which might give some indication of what sort of winter we’ve been having – it’s been deep. If this is what they mean by “the depths of winter,” I can tell you it takes no small amount of shoveling. I will let that stand …

I was eating breakfast. Out the kitchen window, stillness prevailed in the clear dawn except for the titmice and chickadees at the feeder. The river was placid, a coasting sheet of glass reflecting the far shore in the golden glow of first light. The tide had turned in the last hour, the boat on its mooring now headed upriver. The thermometer read eighteen degrees. Three buffleheads beat around the point and wheeled into the cove.

As I munched my toast, my eye caught some movement …